Queer Places:
Villa Rossa, Piazza Fra' Girolamo Savonarola, 15, 50132 Firenze FI
Cimitero di Briosco, Via G. Verdi, 4, 20836 Briosco MB
Countess Nerina Gigliucci (1878 – February 9, 1963), later known by her married name Nerina Medici di Marignano, was an Anglo-Italian nurse, biographer,
and social activist prominent within the intellectual and artistic expatriate community of Florence.
Born in London in 1878 to Count Mario Gigliucci of Fermo and his English wife Edith Mozley, Nerina was raised in a highly cosmopolitan, bilingual household. Her paternal grandmother was the celebrated English soprano Clara Novello. Growing up primarily in Florence at Villa Rossa, Nerina and her younger sister Bona moved effortlessly between British and Italian cultural circles.
Deeply committed to civic duty and social welfare, Nerina trained as a volunteer nurse with the Italian Red Cross in 1911. Her humanitarian work took her aboard the hospital ship Melfi during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya, followed by relief operations during the 1915 Avezzano earthquake, frontline service during World War I, and caretaking during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. In 1920, she married General Gian Angelo Medici di Marignano, after which she expanded her work into biographical writing and historical research, documenting the lives of notable Italian Red Cross nurses and her own family's literary legacy. She lived through the Second World War maintaining the family's Florentine heritage and passed away in 1963.
Nerina Gigliucci’s primary connection to LGBTQ history lies in her lifelong closeness to the British aesthetician, essayist, and writer Violet Paget, who published under the male pseudonym Vernon Lee. Lee was a central figure in 19th- and early 20th-century queer literary history, renowned for her lived non-conformity, aesthetic theories, and long-term romantic relationships with women, including Mary Robinson, Clementina "Kit" Anstruther-Thomson, and Amy Levy.
The Gigliucci family maintained a warm, enduring friendship with Vernon Lee, whose villa, Il Palmerino, was situated near Settignano outside Florence. Nerina grew up within Lee's circle of intellectual aestheticism. Lee took a fond personal interest in Nerina and her sister Bona, often inscribing presentation copies of her books to Nerina with intimate notes of gratitude.
Beyond their immediate friendship, Nerina served as an essential cultural bridge and biographer within Lee's queer expatriate network. Nerina understood Lee's complex identity, famously noting that Lee lived and thought as a true Italian without requiring translation. Following Lee's death in 1935, Nerina helped preserve the memory and intellectual history of the sapphic and aesthetic expatriate enclave in Florence—which included figures such as Sybil Cutting, Lina Waterfield, and Violet Trefusis—ensuring that the nuanced literary legacy of Vernon Lee and her circle remained documented for future generations.
Nerina Gigliucci (Nerina Medici di Marignano) is buried in the family tomb of the Medici di Marignano located at the Cimitero di Briosco (Briosco Cemetery) in Lombardy, Italy, near the area where she spent her final years and passed away in 1963.
While her parents, Mario and Edith Gigliucci, are buried in the English Cemetery (Cimitero degl'Inglesi) in Florence, and other members of the Gigliucci family are interred at the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori, Nerina was laid to rest in the Medici di Marignano family plot in Briosco following her marriage to General Gian Angelo Medici di Marignano.
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